My Darling B got me a Kindle Fire for Christmas. She thought it would come in handy when I’m stuck in a hotel room on a business trip and there’s nothing on the tee-vee worth watching, which happens just about every time I go on the road. A Kindle Fire will let me watch Netflix and Amazon videos and I don’t know what else, probably live television coverage of the Olympics or some such. Oddly, though, what I most like using it for is reading.

I say “oddly” because I’m one of those guys who used to say I didn’t think I’d ever be able to read a book on a computer screen. Then I got a smart phone and I ended up using it way more as a way to read news than as a phone. And when I found out it had a preinstalled Kindle app, I downloaded a book by one of my favorite science fiction authors, John Scalzi, and read the whole thing. Didn’t bother me at all that it was projected onto a screen about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

The Kindle Fire’s got a much larger screen, about the size of a trade paperback, so the text even looks like a page out of a book. I’ve read several books on it so far and I’ve got to say that it’s a lot easier to take to bed than any of the 400-page volumes I sometimes stay up late with. Actually, the Kindle’s a lot easier to take anywhere. I stashed it in my man purse last week so I could read during my breaks at work, and I’ve been curled up all day today on the sofa reading stories from The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection, which would be a 700-page sofa leg if it were a printed book, not as easy to lug around or even to hang on to for hours without getting cramps.

If there’s one thing I don’t like about it, the slick surface of the screen makes it feel like it’s going to slide right out of my hands sometimes, but that’s a pretty slight problem and easily fixed as soon as I get a cover for it.